Re: [ga] is ICANN or is ICANN not? - "CS" fate

[Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Roberto Gaetano wrote:
> Elisabeth Porteneuve wrote:
>
> > When all national networks put country of origin component at 
> > the right end of the domain, JANET reversed the order, 
> > starting with the country of origin on the left, for example: 
> > kirstein@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Is there any connection between putting items left-to-right vs.
> right-to-left with driving on the left vs. the right side of the road?

This is one of those situations that Lessig wrote about, how running code 
coerces choices.

Domain names, at the protocol level, do not have dots.  And are composed of a 
sequence of length/value pairs.  In the protocol the root comes at the end of 
the sequence, the TLD would be the penultimate item in the sequence, etc.  Thus 
in www.cavebear.com, the labels would be, in sequence, 3/www, 8/cavebear, 
3/com, 0/(root)

What we see as "www.cavebear.com" is largely a textual convention for human 
consumption.  It is a convention that, however, is embedded into zone files and 
URLs/URI's and has thus become effectively immutable.

Nearly all software resolves names by calling a function called 
"gethostbyname".  (There are variations, but for our purposes we need not be 
concerned with those variations.)

That code encloses and encapsulates the interpretation of the human-visible 
sequence of domain name labels.

There is no context information, no locale, that is carred along with domain 
names to indicate whether the textual sequence of labels is the normal 
...TLD.root format or the root.TLD... format.  There is no way for 
gethostbyname() to be smart, the best it could do would be a heuristic 
reordering in case a primary lookup fails.

When the UK deviate format was live there was a great deal of confusion both by 
people and in software.  Those were the days before DNS and thus the cure was 
largely to do name lookups in the local hostname file using the entire textual 
string, and populating the hostname file with both variants for the UK deviant 
names or having software try to reverse the name if the normal scan failed.

It was a downright ugly situation and to some extent did cause an impedance 
mismatch when sending email to/from the UK.

		--karl--